Independent Reading and Metacognition:
How to empower our students to become active learners and discover a new love for reading with the use of a powerful tool: a virtual notebook.
My Experience with Independent Reading
As a High School English Language Arts and English Language Development teacher, I have learned how valuable reading and writing has been to the student learning experience. I wanted to ensure that my students were both reading and writing everyday as daily practice to improve their skills as thinking like scholars. Increasing reading and writing in the classroom also exposes students to more vocabulary and aids in the development of their language. In turn, by increasing a student's vocabulary, they begin to form a stronger voice. Growing up with immigrant parents, I was given a first hand experience at the value of reading. My parents explained to me that a primary way they both learned English was to read everything. I grew up in a household where my parents always read to my brother and I, because they knew the value of having high literacy skills. To them, it was a language tool, and soon to me it opened up a new perspective to the world as a bilingual woman in this society. I fell in love with reading and the way it could provide entertainment, perspective, and literacy tools. I knew that when I became an English teacher, I was going to value Independent Reading as much as my parents did and my own past English teachers did. The task is then to create an environment where students feel safe and willing to engage with a book.
I believe that every student learns at their best when they feel like they belong in the classroom and the curriculum is relevant. Once students feel safe to engage in the environment, they are more willing to participate—even in reading. Independent reading is one way to empower student learning and curiosity beyond the curriculum. Independent reading is giving students a choice in their own self-paced exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of a text. When teachers give students the choice to pick a book that interests them, it then promotes more independent habits since students now have control of their reading process. Often, what I have noticed in my own classroom is that when I tell the students what to read, they are less likely to want to participate in the act of reading. However, once given the choice, my students have become much more excited to read when I give them the choice of what they get to read. Once students find a good text that sparks creativity, relates to their experiences, and makes them question the world around them, they become curious learners. Independent reading is important because it can help to strengthen language development, increase critical thinking, and help students see and understand the world from different perspectives. This sense of ownership gives students a chance to explore at their own pace, discover a love of learning, and even practice reading strategies that are taught to them in the classroom.
But let’s be real for a moment, we know what independent reading in the classroom is like: the teacher dims the lights, tells everyone to grab a good book, plays a soft instrumental, and then cue the groans and crickets…. The kids instantly reject the idea because they are not used to reading independently and it is something different for them to do. It always takes some time and trial and error to help students find a book that they think they will love. And that in itself can be something fun to do with your students. In my classroom, I start independent reading as a "speed-meeting" and it creates an environment where they can explore and find something that interests them. This increases their accessibility into a world of reading and they become much more willing to read if they still read about their favorite things.
Inviting student interests into reading makes a big difference in their responses to reading and I believe it is so important to introduce it in such a way. In today's society, it is so easy for students to just scroll through Tik Tok and find things that may interest them, but the act of actually reading and learning about things is completely different and so enriching. For me, growing up, picking a book to read was easy. But here's the thing, I had a totally different experience as a kid. I already had a sense of how valuable books are from a very young age. Independent reading for me opened up a whole new world where I could take charge of my own thinking. Through various characters and dystopian worlds, I was exploring and questioning identities and experiences. Leslie’s Grinner’s adapted S.C.W.A.A.M.P makes a transparent dialogue about privileged ideologies embedded in our systems and those systems came up in my reading:
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins had me questioning how far I am willing to go to protect my own loved ones?
Paper Towns by John Green had me questioning who am I beyond the expectations of others?
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, had me questioning how my race and experiences influence my identity?
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, had me questioning what I would do for my friends?
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, had me questioning where I felt like I belonged.
And so many more that I could go on about...
But that was it! I was now thinking about society, identity, and intersectionality. I was curious. I was engaged. I realized that The pages in the book started to jump out into my real world and I could not put it down. The act of reading helped me to question the world and make connections with my reality and the reality of the characters on the pages.
But how do we teach our kids to actively read in such a way?
Active Reading Using Metacognition
Metacognition or thinking about our thinking is a strategy that is frequently used in my classroom. Students are taught that in order to be good readers, we have to be actively thinking about what we’re reading. This is a moment to slow down from the fast-paced screen scanning they do on their phones, and take a moment to read intentionally with a sense of exploration and curiosity. I teach my kids to find a powerful, interesting, or confusing quote as they read. Then using sentence stems to identify the skills of making connections, clarifying text, drawing understanding, and defining key terms. They use the sentence stems, "I think..., I notice..., I wonder..., This connects to...," in order to further guide their thinking. They will often make these connections right on the pages with sticky notes, in their notebooks, or utilizing Google Forms. The intentional portion is being able to keep a record of their thoughts, questions, and connections in the form of on paper responses or Google Forms. Recording a student’s thought process helps to embrace a classroom culture in which students are exploring varied perspectives to become investigators in what they notice, wonder, think, and any connections they can make. A combination of metacognition and independent reading empowers students with independence and critical thinking. Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in Literacy Today discusses how encouraging independent reading and reflections, “is about creating independent thinkers who think with compassion, logic, and curiosity, and without manipulation from others. They think—and from those thoughts, they become more than they were. They become independent"(Nguyen, 2021).
This tool allows them to actively engage with the reading process and expand their ability to analyze texts. Also, as Lesley Bogad describes it, students can still find, "pleasure and critique" in their interests if they know how to analyze and explore what they are interested in. Keeping a record of their metacognitive process while reading can become a powerful tool in teaching students to expand their thinking, find confidence in their understanding of text, and develop their own voices. It is important for students to still be able to find interest in what they are reading but also be able to use their interests to see the world through different lenses and perspectives.
In addition, Independent reading and reflecting should be a low-stakes assignment for students. While, I still believe that students should be held accountable for their responding and reflecting, it should not be done in a way to turn them off from reading completely. Dr. Michael Wesch discusses how in his classroom, he recognizes that often students will feel defined by grades. If they are failing, they will live up to that identity as a failure and give up. Due to this, he removed the idea of grades from his classroom and had students working on projects of interests. It was challenging but rewarding. What the students attained in doing something important to them was to be "reshaped by the very project of living inside learning, doing something they love and challenging themselves" (Wesch, 2016). In other words, this notion of allowing students to read something that interests them and also makes them think about their reading in a reflective space and helps students to feel capable of thinking critically about a book and its impact on their own worlds.
Technology Application
While there is use of technology in capturing student reflections through Google Forms, advancing our technology use can take this one step further. According to Prensky, there are digital natives and digital immigrants in this world. One group can strongly navigate through technology, while the other is unfamiliar with it. Scott Noon takes this one step further and categorizes different types of technology users. According to his categories, I consider myself between a techno-traditionalist and techno-constructivist, in the sense that technology is often utilized in my classroom as a tool to accomplish traditional classroom tasks like gathering formative data and creating lesson plans through slides. However, I will also utilize technology to change my approach to teaching with virtual gallery walks, online projects, and virtual notebooks. I want technology to help my students use what is familiar to them to help them create meaning and question what they are reading. Walter McKenzie further breaks down each category to emphasize that techno-constructivist are able to "allow their students to see the connections they can make using electronic mail, Web sites, multi-user environments, databases, spreadsheets, publishers, word processors, and more, and they support them and help them successfully complete their tasks" (McKenzie, 2000). In other words, even though students are familiar with technology in today's society, it is still important to show them how all the various types of technology that they use can inter-mingle and help expand their learning. One way to show them this connection of technology and different apps is by showing them that even those apps that they are familiar with can "talk" to each other in a way that can help their learning.
As described before, to facilitate this reflective process in reading, I will usually give my students a Google Form to answer a reflection question. An issue that I have noticed is that by answering reflective questions and sending them directly to me, it removes the engagement aspect of the reflection from being personal to the student to being an impersonal response to give to a teacher for a grade. The use of helping the various different pieces of technology connect with each other can create a space for students to collect their reflections in the form of a notebook, revisit them, and expand on their thought processes. I believe that in order to make independent reading an active practice, students still need to be held accountable without being turned off from reading. Quick snapshots of their thinking through a reflective process is a low stakes way to get students involved in the text and also help them draw connections with what they already know to further engage with the text.
Doc Appender acts as a tool to enhance technology that already works in our classroom, Google Forms, and captures all their reflections in one location; a Google Document. This creates a new type of independent guidance where students can still be given structure to their metacognitive thinking with the organization of Google Form responding but can have all of their responses dropped into one document that they can revisit, build on, and utilize to create an understanding of the text. Introducing this virtual notebook will be phased out in pieces. This will be something that takes modeling and realization that google forms are no longer a “here fill this out and move on” system. They will be the framework to help students get started. The first step is to just get students comfortable with active reading through independent responses. Gradually, students will become stronger independent thinkers of their own texts and this is the magic moment where we can push their abilities further. The next step is that since Doc Appender turns Google Form responses into a collection in a Google doc, students can now share those google docs with each other in groups and have conversations about what they are reading. They can also leave metacognitive responses to each other’s thinking. This encourages a classroom culture where everyone is thinking about thinking and students are able to learn from each other as they develop deeper understandings to texts. So how does Doc Appender actually work? This is a Google Doc extension that needs to be downloaded onto your Chrome. From there, it shows up in all of your Google Forms as a tool that you can use. Below, I have created a "How to Use Doc Appender" tutorial to help you create your own use of Doc Appender in your classroom. While, I think this is helpful for creating a virtual notebook, it is also very helpful in creating a space to gather Parent Communication Logs, Student formative data, and many more uses. So happy Appending! And if you choose to include more Independent Reading and Metacognition in your classroom, happy reading and thinking!
So that’s it! Independent reading doesn’t have to be quiet and silent, it can spark curiosity and with collaborative tools we can help our students utilize books as an avenue to see the world with inquisition and natural reflection. By deepening our students level of critical thinking and active reading, they can open a new window on how to see the world from a critical eye.
How to Use Doc Appender
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| Step 1: I download Doc Appender as a Google Chrome Extension. Once downloaded, it will show up in your Google Forms. On the top right hand corner, you will see a puzzle piece on all of your Google Forms. When you click on this, it will open Doc Appender. But first! Very important, before you start Doc Appender, you need to make a Google Drive for all the data to drop into. The next steps will be how to do that. |
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| Step 2: Create a new Drive Folder. I named mine "Independent Reading Weekly Logs". |
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| Step 3: I double click on the folder to open it. Inside of this "Independent Reading Weekly Logs" folder, I make a new folder for every period. |
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| Step 4: This is important, you will create an empty GOOGLE DOC and not a folder for every student. You will title every Google Doc the exact same name that you will use for the Google Form. |
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| Step 4 continued: In the actual Google Form you created, the first question will be a multiple choice question format. Each answer will be a student's name. You will use for the exact names from the title every Google Doc that you made in Step 3. My other Google Form questions are the writing prompts for student reflection. I plan to use the same Google Form for every reading response, so I make a question using the Dropdown lists options. I put all the questions here and then they can pick which question they would like to reflect on that week. Then I make a new response question for students to actually write in. Now you can open Doc Appender using the puzzle piece in the top right-hand corner of your actual Google Form. |
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| Step 5: Once you have Doc Appender open, you will start your set up. You already set up your folders, so you will click "Pick from Drive." A new open up screen will open. |
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| Step 6: You will pick the class folder for the correct Google Form and then hit Next. |
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| Step 7: You will hit next. You will not be able to click away until you pick a folder. |
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| Step 8: For Step 2 of the set-up, you will pick the question that will append the documents. This is where you select the first question with all the names listed. Then you will hit next. |
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| Step 9: The 3rd step is check off all the questions that you want to be populated in the Google Document. I checked them all off. On the same page, you can pick the format that you would like for it to populate. I picked the bullet point list. |
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Step 10: The final step is to save changes and your documents and your Doc Appender should be set up for use. When a student fills out the form, it should send the responses the chosen Google Doc. For the example below, it was Student 1. Resources: Grinner, L. (n.d.). S.C.W.A.A.M.P. Leslie Grinner | Rhode Island College. https://www.ric.edu/people-directory/leslie-grinner-0 Team, F. and P. (n.d.). What is independent reading?. Fountas & Pinnell LiteracyTM Blog. https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/what-is-independent-reading Mcdaniel, R. (1970, February 9). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/ McKenzie, W. (2000). Are You a Techno-Constructivist?. Education World. https://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech005.shtml Myman, A. (2024, July 1). Getting the most out of the reader’s notebook. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/teaching-reading-interactive-notebooks Nguyen, H. P. (2021, May 17). How to provide less structure for independent reading. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-provide-less-structure-independent-reading/ YouTube. (2016, April 15). What Baby George taught me about learning | dr. Michael Wesch | tedxmhk. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP7dbl0rJS0 |
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